


Otherside

by onnenlintu



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, i am using this tag so as to err on the side of caution, specifically in the sense of "initially misinformed consent"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 15:11:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16725789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: The versions of reality are many, and the versions of ourselves can be too. A one-shot about thinking twice, not thinking at all, and the dreamworld.





	Otherside

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Другаясторона](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313019) by [kuzzzma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuzzzma/pseuds/kuzzzma)



> Hopefully the tags are informative enough. Fic named after the Perfume Genius song.

_You’re dreaming right now. Don’t start being weird._   
  
It had been so easy to say the first time, and the right thing to say too, probably. It was nice to get a explicit warnings about what behaviour might get you in trouble. But in their dream meetings immediately after the first, it hadn’t been necessary. Emil had seemingly remembered that it was real; that he was talking to the same person he’d met in the waking world, and should behave accordingly. When they’d woken up again in one of their strange shared dreamspaces, Lalli should have reminded him again, the moment he started to act strangely.   
  
“Well, uh, we meet over here again.” If Emil remembered what they’d done, he showed no sign of it. “I thought this wasn’t going to happen again, but clearly I was wrong.”   
  
Lalli stared mutely at the water below him, wondering if Emil had totally forgotten the night before, or if he was just so convinced it had been a normal dream that he was merely trying to forget it.   
  
“So, how have you been dealing with everything? You’ve seemed glum.”   
  
“I’m fine.”   
  
“Just so you know, I did try to get you someone to talk with.” Emil started to awkwardly ramble as he told the story of his effort, the stilted fiddling with his hair so at odds with his behaviour last time that Lalli’s uncomfortable guilt made it hard to listen to.   
  
While this thought - most thoughts - had been absent at the time, Lalli did know that dreaming about having sex with someone didn’t always mean you _wanted_ to have sex with them. He had definitely had some weird and unwelcome dreams of that nature, especially in his earlier teens. None had been particularly disturbing in the long run, but then, the awkward sticky-morning encounters with random people had been during his rare normal dreams. The kind without another active participant who knew full well what was going on.   
  
“So then I told her you’re dealing with some stuff - like, I hope that’s okay, I didn’t say what - and then she said, get this, she said they have _nobody_ on board at all who - ”   
  
Lalli stuffed his hands between his knees. Emil was doing his misguided best for him, and it only made all this worse. It would be right to tell him what they’d done, but trying to think about where to begin was impossible, and the memory of it left him almost as tongue-tied as he’d been when it happened. What did people even say, if they had to describe that kind of thing? _You climbed on top of me, you threw away our clothes and found some kind of jelly in our weird dream-logic bed and used it to get my fingers into you, then more, you were so warm and tight and you moaned when I had to bite your shoulder to stay quiet -_ _  
_ _  
_ _You kissed me and I didn’t stop you_ might be a good start.   
  
“Sooo… need to talk?”   
  
“I’m _fine_.” Lalli tried not to look at him. The memories felt like they were still tingling on his neck, on his lips, and where fingers had raked his scalp. “I just want to be on land again.” Some kind of gull getting caught on his fishing line at least provided a direction for his eyes, and he could avoid being horribly aware of Emil sighing and rearranging his legs.   
  
“I hear you on that one. I can’t wait to finally sleep in a proper room and bed again...”   
  
Lalli opened his mouth, almost ready to try to turn the mention of beds into something that might become the right conversation. He had never managed a smooth topic change in his life, and apparently he wasn’t starting now, because his silence was taken not as a pause for thought but as an invitation to keep complaining.   
  
He snuck a glance over at Emil dramatically counting out the list of inadequate sleeping places on his fingers, gesturing for emphasis and rolling his eyes at particularly dissatisfying items. When the complaining finally tailed off, Emil looked over at him, once again assuming a pose of intensely awkward thoughtfulness.   
  
As Emil finished taking a deep breath and started to open his mouth, Lalli absent-mindedly smacked a fish out of the sky. In the same instant, he found himself jerked back into his normal dreamspace, as abruptly as one of those fish might have been taken from a normal lake.   
  
There was nothing to do but lie back on the damp platform, watch the treetops move, and try not to think about how long it might be before they had the chance to talk again.   
  
Quarantine was long. Days blurred into each other, rounded off at the edges by the seasonless vastness of Lalli’s dreams. He tried to sleep as much as possible, his self-maintained forest much more pleasant than the sterile captivity and constant faint nausea of the boat. The feeling of his body repairing itself was palpable, as he finally repaid it the massive debt owed of rest and food, but the constant sleeping left him without any semblance of a daily rhythm. He missed even the chance of his dreams intersecting with Emil’s for days on end, and the pattern of their meetings was already uncomfortably random.   
  
When it finally happened, Lalli barely noticed at first that he was coming into his conscious dreaming. He was so used to it beginning with the feeling of a hard platform at his back that the warmth of another body next to his was disorienting, and when he rolled over and found himself face-to-face with Emil again, any plan he had to mention something was immediately stalled by the soft slide of a tongue into his mouth.   
  
This time, Emil pulled Lalli on top of him, smiling and sighing despite how fumbling Lalli’s attempt to keep up was. Lalli pushed him down, willing himself to speak. Emil’s hair was pooling on the pillow like soft sunshine, and he was all but naked, and his hands were exploring past Lalli’s weak attempt to hold him back. Lalli didn’t stop it when his mouth was occupied again. He let Emil stroke him with an oily hand, wrap legs around his waist, and - once Lalli had worked out how to get it in - murmer some incredibly cheesy things about never stopping.   
  
Later, Lalli would wonder if that moment of uncoordination would have been a good time to point out what was happening. Emil had been so pleased about what was going on, though. Even Lalli, known ruiner of moments, couldn’t bring himself to interrupt it. The sight of Emil finishing, pink-cheeked and chest heaving, then begging for Lalli to keep going had been both too good and too far in to stop at.   
  
Lalli thought he probably took too long. He finished with his face crushed into the side of Emil’s neck, feeling like his head was full of sharp heat, and Emil made a small happy noise as it happened. Relaxing against Emil’s body was like lying on the softest and most thickly-blanketed haypile, peaceful and welcoming. When their dreams separated again, Lalli moved the fingers that he’d had in Emil’s hair, and they felt far too cold.   
  
In what must have been the small hours of that morning, sitting once again on his lonely platform, Lalli’s guilt returned with all its frustration. _Couldn’t bring myself to interrupt it_ felt like an absolute failure of an excuse, and neither excuses nor failure were ever acceptable. Lalli knew better than to disturb the depths of the water, but had he been able to hurl a rock into it, he would have. The endless swamp quickly ate up the tiny splashes made by Lalli’s agitated shifting. At the edge of his pond, a woodpecker started to hammer into the side of a tree. Lalli watched it work, feeling some emotion he couldn’t place at the sight of its little red-spotted head blurring with the movement, and waited for the silence to return.   
  
The waking times were so bright and buzzy. They turned off the lights in here sometimes, but not nearly often enough. It was like summer, but without any of the redeeming features. In his dreams, even near the forest floor Lalli felt the slight shifting of wind, the subtle change in the cool air as the light faded from late dawn to early dusk and back again. Here, it was always slightly too warm, and the air was so humid and stale mosquitos could have bred in it. He didn’t feel right, being both without a jacket and free of goosebumps at night.   
  
Meanwhile, Emil sat around in the cubicle opposite him, attempting reassuring chat and starting games of chess. Emil’s thinking face bore a painful resemblance to the face he’d made then, and despite usually thriving on the chance to focus sharply, Lalli found himself distracted by the memories more and more. He lost their matches rarely, but still more often than he should have.   
  
In his dreams, he walked through a spring woodland, through the shallows of a lake so wide it might have been the sea and into the shadow of a blooming bird-cherry on its shore. Under the white blossom canopy, the ground crunched, and Lalli realised that the carpet surrounding the trunk was snow. When he came out the other side, the lake was gone, forest instead stretching as far as he could see in every direction. The delicate, drooping twigs of the birches collected little loads of powdery snow for the wind to knock off with every gust, and behind him, Lalli heard a footstep.   
  
“Hah, so we meet again! I really thought we were done with these meetings, but I guess it’s for the best? I meant to ask if they were feeding you enough, you still look - ”   
  
“Emil.” Lalli heard the rambling stop, and turning, faced him. The abrupt feeling that he was going to be sick rivalled the effect of any boat.   
  
Emil waited for whatever was coming next, moving so little that the powdery snow started to collect on his nose as well, soft and subtly ridiculous. The violent nausea in Lalli’s stomach started to turn to a different kind of guts-twisting, the same one he’d first felt when he’d worked out what that fluttery touch-me feeling meant, and the same one that had caught his tongue when Emil had first kissed him. With a deep breath, Lalli gulped it back down and spoke.   
  
“We’ve met in a lot of dreams.”   
  
Emil relaxed and smiled, the brightness of his face making this worse. “Oh, yeah, we have. I was worried there, the way your face went just now, you looked like you were about to be - ”   
  
“ _Listen_. It’s important. You - we - we had sex. In a dream. Your dream.”   
  
Emil’s mouth fell open, then closed, then opened again as if to speak before producing a string of stammering gibberish. Lalli caught it all from the corner of his eye, unable to look anywhere even close to Emil’s face. When Emil got through the stammering, the first phrase he produced was a near-voiceless “We had _what_?”   
  
“Sex. In your dream.”   
  
“You’ve been in _all_ my dreams?” Emil abruptly sat down on the forest floor, and Lalli tried to look at him properly. He was grasping at his fringe, partly concealing his face, although not enough to hide the intense crimson boiling all over it. Lalli assumed he would be processing some guilt about having done this to Emil later.   
  
“I guess so.”   
  
Emil’s wide-eyed stare, fixed at some point in the middle distance, was one of utter horror and confusion. Lalli stood in place, feeling mostly like he couldn’t have expected this to actually go any better, but wishing against all logic that it could have anyway.   
  
The snow continued to fall at an even pace, flurries dancing where the wind caught them. Emil must be getting damp, sitting where he was. Snow began to collect in the thick locks of his hair, and Lalli took a tentative step towards him, pausing when Emil finally spoke again in a small voice.   
  
“Can I ask what that thing was with the weasel skins?”   
  
Lalli squinted. “Eh?”   
  
Emil looked up, still peeking through his fingers with slightly teary eyes. “The, the one a month ago, where you did the um… I don’t remember it very well but it was… weird, I’m sorry but I don’t think I found it very erotic knowing that knife also carved the bones out of that dog, and I don’t know why we had to make dinner for everyone afterwards either, or why my dad came in to yell at us, or - ”   
  
“Your dreams _this week_.” Lalli clarified feeling like several of his souls might be about to depart just to escape this conversation.   
  
Emil let his hands fall into his lap. His face was a mess. “Oh.” Another long pause. “That one was just me, after all?” He stared once again at some point in the distance only he could see. “Oh my God, we did _what_?”   
  
“Had sex, in your dream.” Lalli almost felt reassured having to repeat the basic facts of the situation over and over. At least this felt very definitely like dealing with the conscious Emil.   
  
Emil’s eyes going from shiny to flooded with tears made the stick in Lalli’s guts twist with real force, and because nothing was ever easy, the dream once again shifted to leave Lalli sitting on a platform in a pond under an endless midsummer night’s sky. When the woodpecker started again, he wanted to curse it.   
  
Sitting in the cubicle opposite Emil again gave Lalli plenty of time to think about what they’d discussed, as well as the all-too-visible behaviour occurring on Emil’s side. It was impossible to know what exactly to make of it, the way Emil turned his face away every time Lalli looked in his direction. Whatever it was, it didn’t help the gnawing feeling of having deeply, probably irreversibly, messed something up. Emil’s gestures towards sleeping at the same time on the first day were hard to go along with, with the schedule Lalli had fallen into, and when he tried anyway it was to no avail. Waking the next morning to the sight of Emil sitting in bed with his legs curled to his chest, watching Lalli with unmistakable sadness, was a terrible feeling.   
  
Emil had been right that Lalli was already dealing with a lot, but at least most of it had been things one had to merely accept, rather than twist yourself into a knot trying to resolve. Acceptance wasn’t as easy as it should have been, but at least Lalli had practise at it. Watching Emil stew in his cubicle was something Lalli had no tactics for at all, and it made going to sleep on time close to impossible. In his dreams he walked again through snow-dusted clearings, trod gently through knee-deep oatfields, and picked his way along rocky lakeshores covered by spring and autumn sleet. It seemed like the hard-won predictability of waking up on his platform was truly gone, and it should have worried him more.   
  
Finally, as he walked through a dim and frosty November forest, he caught the sight of bright golden hair through the spruces’ green. Emil was leaning against the trunk of a fallen tree, scratching at something on the bark, and hadn’t yet noticed Lalli’s movement. He remained oblivious to Lalli’s footfall on the moss, even as the tip of his shoe caught a twig enough to break it, and even as Lalli got close enough that he could have reached out and touched him.   
  
“Emil.”   
  
Even despite the situation, the way Emil squeaked and jumped was something like funny. It brought up that fluttering again, like seeing him brush his hair back, or like hearing the new and breathy voice he’d had while stripping Lalli’s clothes off him.   
  
Emil exhaled forcefully, placing a hand on his chest. “Lalli, you’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days, I - _oh_. Oh, God, Lalli, listen, I am so sorry.”   
  
Lalli watched the mid-sentence transition from ‘recovery from shock’ to ‘close to tears’ in utter surprise, feeling more out of his depth than ever. “What?”   
  
“You’re really here now?” Emil looked Lalli directly in the face, forcing Lalli to turn away. “Lalli? Is this a normal dream, I want to know - ”   
  
“I’m here.” Lalli could tell that in the corner of his vision, Emil was actually starting to cry.   
  
“I - I don’t know how to apologise to you, I - I remember what we did but I - don’t remember well? But it’s not an excuse and I - how did we? How did I get you to - I’m sorry, no, I shouldn’t make you say what - ”   
  
“I don’t understand.” Lalli finally managed to find a gap in which to speak through Emil’s tearful rambling. He felt like his head was buzzing.   
  
“Well you, you couldn’t have wanted to?” Emil’s voice was hoarse and strained, each word crawling out of his throat with great difficulty. "You can't actually be - be attracted to me."  
  
Lalli had to pause. It hadn’t even occurred to him that this might be the source of Emil’s misery. He’d been frustratedly told many times that his face was ‘hard to read’, and that the things obvious to him were not necessarily so to others. Emil missed the obvious very regularly anyway. Perhaps, then, this possibility should have occurred to Lalli. Still, he wished he’d known earlier that he’d be asked that first question, because then he’d have worked out the answer to that, too. Meanwhile, Emil continued to weep at what he thought he’d done.   
  
“I didn’t _not_ want to?” Lalli offered this, and Emil just blinked at him in confusion, no less upset.   
  
“You didn’t… not… want to.” Emil sounded the phrase out as if it were a new word. “Does that mean you… _did_ want to?”   
  
Lalli just shrugged, which made Emil burst into tears and begin apologising again, both for whatever he thought he’d done and for crying about it. Reaching out to take Emil’s damp hand from his eye, he did his best to address him to his face. “It was nice, I think.”   
  
That worked, a bit. Emil looked at the hand holding his with wide eyes, and no more tears seemed to be coming just yet. “Really?”   
  
Lalli still had to think about it. “I think so. I mean, it happened twice, and you - ” Finally reminded of exactly what he’d wanted to deal with in the first place, he rerouted from describing specifically what he’d liked about it. “I thought I was the one who’d done it wrong. You didn’t know, and I could have said.”   
  
“I wish I’d known.”   
  
There was the guilt again. “I made you cry.”   
  
“No! No, no - okay, yes, a bit actually - but - wait, you liked it?” Emil’s face, blotchy and tear-streaked, brightened up before creasing again. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me I was dreaming? I didn’t ask you how you wanted - _did_ I ask?”   
  
Lalli shifted from side to side. While he rarely felt compelled to even slightly bend the truth around people’s feelings, this was proving a real exception. “It was okay.”   
  
“Lalli!”   
  
“I said I wanted to, didn’t I? I don’t know what people do anyway! I hadn’t even kissed anyone before you climbed on top of me - ”   
  
Maybe Lalli should have guessed that saying that would send Emil to pieces again. People were weird about that kind of thing, and he could well have guessed Emil was that sort of sentimental. The stammering apologies about not taking it slower felt mostly just awkward. They’d done it now, and they both found something in it to feel terrible about, and that was how it was going to be.   
  
“I just wish we hadn’t messed it up so much, when, well, I guess you know how I - how I think about you, if I’m dreaming about… that, every other night.”   
  
“No, I don’t.”   
  
Emil gestured with his free hand in a way that seemed quite random. “You know! I guess you must know I think about it, well, a lot.”   
  
“No. People have sex dreams about all sorts of stuff.”   
  
“Oh. I guess.” Emil didn’t seem to know how to respond to that correction. “Well, just so you know, I - you can assume, you know, the obvious.” Lalli was about to point out again that evidently, it was non-obvious, but Emil followed his statement up with “I mean, I’ve _been_ wanting, um. I just wish we’d done that after, um. I don’t know. I should have at least bought you dinner first.”   
  
Lalli was mystified. “Where?”   
  
“I don’t know! Somewhere fancy. You deserve nice things.” Emil rubbed the hand holding his with this thumb when he said that, shifting and stammering again.   
  
“It would have hated it.”   
  
Emil laughed weakly. “I guess so. God. What a mess.” His hand was still wet with tears, still kept away from his face by Lalli’s, and he curled their fingers together with a hesitancy that belonged entirely to his conscious self. “Lalli? Can I do this?”   
  
“Oh. Yeah?”   
  
Lalli didn’t really know how long you were meant to hold someone’s hand for, so he just stuck with waiting for Emil’s cue to stop, and ended up moving to sit on the fallen tree beside him with their fingers still twisted up together. A willow tit called, and Emil said he’d always wondered what that “complaining-sounding bird” was. Lalli told him, and Emil repeated it, the pleased little smile as he did it bringing a willow-tit-sized example of those stomach flutters back. Lalli supposed this meant they weren’t awfully upset about things now, although specifically what else it meant remained a mystery.   
  
There was no way to work it out any more clearly, in the days following. They continued to play chess through the glass, and Emil continued with his lingering looks, and when they met again it was merely days before quarantine was due to end. Lalli never removed his gaze from the white field he’d been contemplating, the unmistakable sight of Saimaa’s waters in the depths of winter, as Emil huffed and stomped up through the snow behind him.   
  
“Can’t you make it any warmer in these dreams?”   
  
“Never tried.” Lalli turned to face him. Emil was shivering in his inadequate little ribbon-tied jumper, once again bright-cheeked and snowy-haired. “Walking will help.”   
  
“Together walking?”   
  
“Mm.”   
  
The air was so cold the snow squeaked as they trod in it. Lalli drew his fur cloak around him and still felt the bite wherever there were gaps. There was air coming from somewhere that was warm enough to have a scent, and he led Emil around a little ridge of stones that was slick with half-melted snow. When the pair of them emerged into a hayfield, bright and warm, Emil let out a whoop of relief. “I thought I was going to lose fingers there!”   
  
“You don’t here, even if you feel like you should.” Lalli spread himself out on the ground, having no desire to walk further.   
  
“Huh. That’s interesting.” Emil lay down beside him, close enough for Lalli to feel the long grass bending and smell its fragrance as it compressed, far away enough that their heat didn’t mix. “Hey, um, so are we okay?”   
  
“What?”   
  
“I just wanted to double check, you know, it was a pretty weird conversation.”   
  
“Oh. I’m fine.”   
  
“Can I ask if you would ever have done that without me just, ah, starting it?” Emil’s voice wavered for a moment, despite his seeming composure compared to last time.   
  
“I hadn’t been thinking about it.”   
  
“Oh. Yeah, sorry. I’m stupid. Lots of more important stuff.”   
  
“I’ve been thinking about it _since_ then.”   
  
“Thinking what?”   
  
“That it was nice.”   
  
“Oh. Um, good. That’s really good to hear.”   
  
Lalli wondered where that dragonfly had come from. It didn’t smell like they were that close to water. The appearance of an entire horde of dragonflies squeezing one by one out of the tip of a blade of grass answered his question, and he watched them pour out with quiet interest. Emil was right, it was good that despite it all, they were on the same page here. What wasn’t good was how unstable these dreams were. Again, Lalli felt some kind of oddness over not being more panicked by it. They at least felt safer than deliberately crossing the dream seas, although he had nothing like the knowledge to say why.   
  
“I know you said you would probably hate fancy dinner, but can I at least take you to get ice cream when we get to Iceland?”   
  
“What is it?”   
  
“Ice cream?”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“It’s um, milky, and sweet. And cold.”   
  
Lalli thought about it. “It sounds okay.” After a few more moments staring at the clouds and listening to Emil’s slow breaths, he realised this didn’t quite logically imply his actual answer. “You can take me to get some.”   
  
Reykjavik smelled terrible, in much the same way Mora had, but Lalli nearly hugged the ground anyway when they left the boat. The final traces of his nausea fading cleared his head in a way he’d actually stopped noticing he was missing, and the unevenness of the cobblestones under his fingers felt blissfully organic after a month of straight lines and bleached fabrics.   
  
Onni’s hand found the back of his jacket and tugged him into a half-embrace, and Lalli reeled again as he heard and understood real-life speech for the first time in six weeks. It was another thing he’d stopped noticing the lack of.     
  
“Don’t dwell on it.”   
  
Lalli snuck a glance over at Onni’s face, and found him averting his eyes just as eagerly as Lalli usually did.   
  
“It’ll be fine. We will be fine.”   
  
Lalli looked back towards the ground, rigid against the weight of Onni’s hand on his shoulder. Here in the shadow, his jacket was not quite enough to defeat the mid-spring wind, and Onni’s was just as thin. Onni’s grip tightened very slightly as Lalli’s body produced the hint of a shiver. The screeching reunion of Reynir and his mother, and of Emil with his family, continued in front of them. Lalli let Onni pull him against his side as they watched Reynir’s mother alternate between twisting her son’s ear and covering his cheeks with kisses. If there was more to say about this, Lalli couldn’t think at all of what it might be.   
  
There was nowhere in this place that was truly free of crowds, but Onni made some arrangement with Emil’s father, or uncle, or whatever that man had been, and led Lalli through the streets until they found somewhere it was possible to sit. The scattered showers of sleet and ensuing bright sunshine left the streets gleaming, and on a bench near the shore, they finally looked at each other. Lalli had almost forgotten to feel apprehension at Onni taking him aside, but when Onni began with one of his _talk time_ deep breaths, the feeling rushed in all at once.   
  
“I want you to know I don’t blame you.” Onni spoke quietly, half towards his shoes, but enunciated each word as if he was reading out to a crowd.   
  
Lalli stayed frozen in place. He had no response to this.   
  
“I guess you haven’t really heard that from me before.”   
  
Lalli shook his head.   
  
“I mean it though, Lalli. I’ve had a lot of time to think about how things were going to be when we met again. And how things have been, and, um. Oh, I don’t know. Please say something.”   
  
“I don’t know what you want to hear.”   
  
Onni stiffened at the response, and contemplated his shoes with new intensity for quite some time before answering. “I want to know you’re well, Lalli. If you are.”   
  
The sleet was coming again. “I am well.”   
  
“You said you’d made a friend.”   
  
Lalli shifted in his seat. “Mm.”   
  
“Everything’s going alright with them?”   
  
“I guess.”   
  
The sleet stopped and the sun began to again melt it into puddles. Lalli realised he did actually have some comment here. “He said he’s going to take me to eat ice cream. It sounds okay.”   
  
“Oh! Oh, good.” Onni took another of his meaningful deep breaths. “We will get through this, alright?”   
  
“I know we will.” It wasn’t as if there was any other option.   
  
Onni nodded and stood. “Okay. I suppose there’s things we have to do with them all.”   
  
Lalli would rather have hidden under a rock, but it was true. “Mm.”   
  
The carefulness with which Onni had brought him away and tried to absolve him left Lalli feeling strange all day. It felt like he’d cheated somehow, getting away from the situation without being reminded of his responsibility and culpability. After some meeting Lalli had not comprehended a word of, Emil managed to communicate that they should go somewhere, and Onni had followed.   
  
“I somehow missed that he doesn’t speak any Icelandic. I thought I was coming to help translate.” Onni whispered it at Lalli despite the fact he could have yelled and had their conversation be just as secret. Everyone else queueing inside this little shop was chattering away in obvious Icelandic, Emil having trouble even ordering. “Should I go?”   
  
Lalli once again took a moment to process the fact that Onni was actually asking his opinion. “I think it’s fine.”   
  
Emil’s finger-waving and loud, slow Swedish finally yielded three little twists of thin bread, open at the top and filled with something that was as promised sweet, milky and creamy. Lalli had to help him carry the third one, and when they sat together, Onni approached it with even more trepidation than Lalli did.   
  
Sitting between the two of them, Lalli felt Emil’s knee touch his, then shift away. Onni didn’t remark on Lalli’s choice of friend being someone who couldn’t really hold a conversation. The three of them sat in near-silence, Lalli and Onni following Emil’s lead as he licked at his icy, lightly spiced glob of cream. With Lalli sat between them, they coexisted, and Lalli supposed this was part of how things could be. He crunched down on the sweet bread that had been holding the ice cream. Onni shook Emil’s hand and continued to talk to Lalli as if he’d thought carefully about each thing he meant to say. Later that evening, when Emil walked alone with Lalli for a short while, he laced their fingers together again with a tentativeness that bordered on frustrating.   
  
It was nice, both to know the more considered version of each of them, and to understand it as what it was. Lalli felt like this was something he needed, and recognising that feeling was surprisingly nice, too. He still remembered every day what he’d done in Emil’s unthinking dreams. Pondering it, he realised he wished very much that he could know the conscious version.   
  
The staircase outside his room was pitch black by the time he properly made the decision to move. Planks in the floor betrayed even the lightest steps, but neither that noise nor the little taps he made on Emil’s door roused anybody. Tapping slightly more loudly, he heard a bed shift, then Emil’s step approaching. When Emil opened the door, dimly backlit by the street lamp outside his window, he was wearing only a pair of soft and baggy trousers. “Lalli? _Vad_ \- ah - why?” He opened his mouth again, but found no more words he could apply. “Welcome?”   
  
Lalli stepped into Emil’s room, shutting the door behind him. As Emil stepped further towards the window, Lalli noticed that his hair was already tousled by sleep. When he reached out to press it back down, Emil stood still, and when he was done he didn’t take away his hand. Stepping in closer, pressing their chests together, he asked “Is it good?”   
  
“Oh!” The half-lit outlines of Emil’s face formed into the shape of surprise. “ _Ja? Ja._ ”   
  
Emil kissed differently at first, harder-lipped, tenser and more restrained, but Lalli’s arm slipping around his waist made him just as soft as before. The pace of Emil relaxing, easing into the roaming of hands up Lalli’s shirt, gave room to move and think. When their bodies pressed closer, bringing their hips tightly together, Lalli learned how much he enjoyed the pulse of them growing slowly harder against each other. The sensation bloomed there in time with their ticking pulses, hotter and more urgent as Lalli’s shirt came off, and Lalli remembered the noise Emil made when you pressed him into a mattress.   
  
He stopped to breathe, and Emil froze again, pausing stock-still in the middle of slipping his thumbs into Lalli’s waistband.   
  
“Lalli?”   
  
“Mm. Wait.” Lalli nuzzled into Emil’s neck, drawing out another little sigh. “Bed?”   
  
“Hm?”   
  
Lalli gestured.   
  
“Ah!”   
  
Emil spread his legs before Lalli had even got on the bed. When Lalli placed a hand on Emil’s chest and gently pushed, he sank back, as pliable as clover stems. He knelt between Emil’s legs to kiss him, then pressed himself down, grinding against him to hear him gasp. He bit at Emil’s neck, and felt how his cock throbbed when Lalli dug teeth into his earlobes. Emil submitted to every new way Lalli tried delving into him with grateful, hungry moaning, and when Lalli finally started to inch his pants off him, he shivered and reciprocated the action with clumsy hands.   
  
The light musk of their cocks being freed mixed with the scent of their sweat. Emil’s naked thighs had a special animal softness, and his hard cock in Lalli’s hand felt hot as a stovetop. He said something Lalli was sure meant he didn’t have - something, a disappointed noise, and then with a sharp intake of breath he seemed to change his mind. Shimmying out from under Lalli, he bent over his bag, and Lalli could see the outline of his buttocks caught in sharp relief by the patchy streetlamp as he searched.   
  
Emil was apologising and getting back into bed, pressing his body back up close, covering his fingers with a mess of the stuff he’d been using to fix his chapped lips. Lalli considered for a moment getting up and turning the light on for this, because even the half-lit sight of Emil sliding a finger into himself made his cock feel suddenly tighter and hotter than anything else he’d ever seen. When Emil started to move it in and out, biting his lip, Lalli had to remember to breathe.   
  
Lalli wasn’t sure exactly what he was hearing, but it seemed Emil needed to know if he wanted it like this. Pressing Emil down again, he followed his movement, cautiously slipping one finger in to join Emil’s. Emil cried out for a moment, whined as he started to guide Lalli’s hand, and helped slather more of the mess on Lalli’s fingers. Lalli worked it in deeper, found a little patch that made Emil’s face twist into the best expressions he’d ever seen, and massaged it with rapt attention to every shiver it produced in Emil’s limbs.   
  
Emil started to beg, words Lalli was sure he’d never heard but understood the meaning of perfectly well, and gasped when Lalli took the last of the mess for his cock.   
  
Lalli definitely did not take too long this time. Sliding deep into Emil, he felt like the world shrunk down to the hot, tight pressure on his cock, Emil’s desperate gasping underneath him, Emil’s lips on his skin and the hands pulling him in deeper again and again. Lalli pressed Emil’s thighs back and he opened up so readily. As much as Lalli tried to draw it out, it was impossible to not respond to Emil’s moaning growing with every minute. Collapsing against Emil’s shoulder, mind blank, he lost himself in the feeling of coming hard inside him.   
  
Emil was still gasping and hard, looking lost. When Lalli pulled out and took Emil’s cock in his hand to try to give him his turn, he must have done something right, because Emil came soon and biting his hand to stay quiet.   
  
They had dreamed wrapped around each other before, and it seemed that must have been years ago, even if it had only been five weeks. This was more comfortable than the barrel they’d saved their lives by hiding in, and nobody needed to wake up to see if the lid was still on their bed. The mattress on which they lay wasn’t in any kind of room here. The distant mountains at the edge of the ocean they floated in were tinged with an oddly-coloured sunrise.   
  
Emil curled into Lalli’s side with a happy murmur. “I’m glad we woke up here. I wanted to tell you thanks for that.”   
  
Lalli still didn’t know what had happened to his dreams, or where any of this would lead. The endless ocean around them was quiet, though, and there was no crossing it. Having no choice but to lie here, nose buried in Emil's soft hair, was enough for now. 


End file.
